The men sacrificed the better part of the lives for sport
Bosmont Football Association (BFA).
Barney Gaffney was a woodwork teacher at Coronationville High School until his retirement.
He was elected as the 2nd Chairperson of the Bosmont Football Association (BFA) in 1966. He served BFA as chairperson for over 40 years.
According to Michael Khan, during this time he fought the council to improve the sporting fields because when he started it was one sand pitch.
Today BFA have five outside fields, dressing rooms, and a stadium with dressing rooms and a meeting room, with full floodlights in the stadium and practice lights outside.
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Gaffney personally did all the steel work at the stadium and all the trees that are there were planted by him. He served BFA as a delegate to the Transvaal Council on Sport and the Transvaal Soccer Board.
Isaac de Jongh, the current chairman of Bosmont Football Association explained that he learned integrity and honesty from Barney Gaffney.
“Another thing that Mr Gaffney stands for is non- racialism because at the time the BFA was the only association who played with blacks and Indians, there is no race, we need to respect each other. I’ve learned a lot from him, the one thing that I fail at being is being a disciplinarian like Mr Gaffney,” he said.
Reggie Feldmam was an English teacher and deputy principal then became the principal of Chris J Botha (CJB), he oversaw the complete rebuilding of the school and school hall from the start of 1978. During his time at the school, school buses were bought, opened a library and much more.
More significantly Reggie Feldman was a sports administrator. He was involved in many codes of sport. He started and served on the old SA Soccer Association Board in the 1950’s. He served on many other codes.
Then later got involved in initiating the formation of the Transvaal Primary Schools Board and the Transvaal High Schools Sport Board. He became an official of the Transvaal Cricket Board.
He was the first elected President of the Transvaal Council On Sport. He then got elected to the Executive of the South African Council on Sport.
Eventually becoming the President of SACOS. Corin Mathews, a representative of the Non-Racial Sport History Project said: “I can only speak of Reggie Veldman from my days at CJB, he was a real man, with real flaws and challenges but it was at the midst of that big personality and what he has done for us in the community that it’s very hard to see those flaws.
“Reggie could walk into a hall of 1200 laaities and they would be quiet because he was walking in. When we speak of Reggie Veldman, we talking about the footprint that went deep in the roads in our communities, that went deep to a provincial, national and international level.”
According to Khan, BFA made the decision to launch this project because (in developing the history through the Non-Racial History Project) because they realised that these two gentlemen sacrificed the better part of the lives for sport.
